BIO
Violin virtuoso and visionary Etienne Gara has performed extensively across the globe. He has appeared as soloist in such renowned venues as the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, the Soraya, and the SOKA Performing Art Center in the Greater Los Angeles Area, Jordan Hall in Boston, the Marigny Theatre in Paris, the Wiener and Marmor Saals of the Mirabell Palace in Salzburg and many more. Since making his orchestral solo debut in 2005 with the Savaria Symphony Orchestra in Hungary, he has continued his soloist career in Europe, the United States and Asia. Gara will make his debut at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in the Fall 2025. His concerts have been broadcast in the USA, Hungary, Switzerland, France and Belgium. His “French Recital” album was recorded on the 1714 Leonora Jackson Stradivarius.
French by birth, Hungarian by heritage, and a globally-traveled citizen of the world, Gara’s international career working with global icons such as ltzhak Perlman, Leonard Cohen, Patrice Rushen, and Benjamin Millepied is just one facet of his creative explorations. Gara is the founder and Artistic Director of Delirium Musicum, an award-winning self-conducted chamber orchestra based in Los Angeles since 2018. With the ensemble, he won the Global Music Awards Silver Medal for "Outstanding Achievement" among several other recognitions and awards, and recorded SEASONS, featuring Max Richter's Vivaldi - The Four Seasons Recomposed, and Philip Glass's Second Violin Concerto "American Four Seasons", for Warner Classics. With the ensemble, now a Warner Classics exclusive artist, he will again lead the orchestra in a second album to be released in 2025.
Gara has created barrier-breaking projects uniting genres, people, and ideas during tenures as Artist in Residence at The Soraya Performing Arts Center (2021-2023) where he served as Music Director of Treelogy, a musical homage to the resilience of the iconic trees of California, and at the USC Brain & Creativity Institute (2019-), where he was commissioned to create ''Sketches of Miles," a production that brings together the classical and the jazz worlds. Passionate about presenting music that is connected to our times and social environment, he premiered works by composers such as Billy Childs, Steven Mackey, Gabriella Smith, Eric Tanguy, and more. Gara launched MusiKaravan in 2020 to bring music wherever it is needed with Boris, the 1971 VW bus. The first season of 15 video episodes of MusiKaravan's 6-month journey from the Mexican to the Canadian borders won the Audience Choice Award of the San Francisco Classical Voice.
A 2010 laureate of the prestigious Fondation Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet and a laureate of the Fifth International Chamber Music Ensemble competition in Boston, Gara is a winner of Sir Yehudi Menuhin's "Music Live Now" competition and of the 2014 and 2016 Beverly Hills National Auditions among other awards. As a passionate chamber musician, he has performed with many renowned artists such as Billy Childs, Lucy Chapman, Robert Tapping, Jacob Koranyi, Julian Steckel, John Walz, Daniel Blumenthal, Plamena Mangova and Denis Pascal. As an advocate for the arts, he has collaborated with The American Contemporary Ballet, the Austin Eurythmy Ensemble, the L.A. Dance Project, and appeared on screen in several shorts and feature films. He founded the award-wining Sunset Club Trio, an ensemble joining the forces of the violin, the electric guitar and the flamenco guitar in their own arrangements of the great classical repertoire.
Gara has been a frequent guest of international music festivals, including the Stavelot Festival in Belgium, the Aurora Festival in Sweden, the Thy Festival in Denmark and the Academy of Music of Lausanne where he was nominated laureate as part of one of the best violin-piano duos. He performed at the Tons Voisins and the Juventus Festival in France where he met the composer Eric Tanguy, who later wrote a piece for him.
He began playing violin at age five in Paris and later studied in Salzburg at the Mozarteum University, at the Musikhochschule of Cologne with Victor Tretiakov, as an Erasmus scholarship recipient, before completing a Performer Diploma with Mauricio Fuks at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He earned his Master of Music at New England Conservatory under renowned pedagogue Donald Weilerstein and pursued post-graduate studies with Midori in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. He also worked closely with Irina Botchkova, Miriam Fried, Itzhak Perlman, Kim Kashkashian, Paul Katz, János Starker, Menahem Pressler, and the Borromeo Quartet.